"and there was this feeling there—this overwhelming feeling of anticipated joy and unfettered possibility—that is still palpable in my consciousness. the feeling of good things—unknown and unmentionable yet vaguely familiar—to come. life, in all its glory, sprawled out in front of me in a moment." - shelley mcconkie

"My heart is on fire this morning as I study what it means to be a pilgrim, not a wanderer or a tourist, in this world. Pilgrims spend their lives going somewhere-- getting closer to God. I used to think every journey required a backpack. Turns out, you don't need a plane ticket to change every little way you've ever found God, you simply need the will and the hunger. You could actually learn to eat, pray, and love right where you are. You could figure out how to live in the skins of "wild faith" from your own 1-bedroom apartment. As Eugene Peterson writes about repentance, I realize I need to know the word more because every definition ever handed to me has staled from sitting out too long-- "repentance is a decision. It is deciding you've been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god." Repentance is a decision to stop death-gripping the dead in your life and become a pilgrim to a path of peace. You reject one path-- the one you've settled to travel on-- and accept another one. You say "no" to a life that used to suffice. You see the split in the road, the fork, and you take the path that makes you nauseous. William Faulkner said (in a different set of words than this): You don't build a monument for a life that used to fit, you simply track the footsteps away from your past-- more and more gathered proof that you actually moved. Lord, teach me to move. Teach me to move."

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture
in the lonely shore,
There is society,
where none intrudes,
By the deep sea,
and Music in its roar:
I love not man the less,
But nature more.
-George Gordon Byron

"You can
die for it-
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of down, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire."
-Mary Oliver

Thursday, October 8, 2015

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the wordsget it all wrong. We say bread and it means accordingto which nation. French has no word for home,and we have no word for strict pleasure. A peoplein northern India is dying out because their ancienttongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lostvocabularies that might express some of whatwe no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts wouldfinally explain why the couples on their tombsare smiling. And maybe not. When the thousandsof mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,they seemed to be business records. But what if theyare poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelveEthiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with boltsof long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundredpitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are whatmy body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are thisdesire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan scriptis not language but a map. What we feel most hasno name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

“Emotional maturity is a measure of the extent to which individuals are able to follow their own values and self-directed life course within their particular social context, while being emotionally present with others, rather than living reactively by the cues of those close to them.”

“Either you’re happy with very little, free of all that extra luggage, because you have happiness inside, or you don’t get anywhere! I am not advocating poverty. I am advocating sobriety. But since we have invented a consumer society, the economy must constantly grow. If it fails to increase, it’s a tragedy. We have invented a mountain of superfluous needs. Shopping for new, discarding the old… That’s a waste of our lives!. When I buy something, when you buy something, you’re not paying money for it. You’re paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing money can’t buy. Life only gets shorter. And it is pitiful to waste one’s life and freedom that way.”

“Single people want relationships, settled people wonder if they’re missing out on something, traveling types miss stability, stable ones are restless, old friends want new friends, new friends miss old friends, and basically almost everyone my age has some dangling worry trailing around after them everywhere that they’re somehow not doing everything, that what they’re doing is not altogether the right thing, that they are missing out. … Do not be ashamed. The doubt is natural, and everyone you know – yes, even that person – carries it sometimes too. Allow yourself to be peaceful. Allow yourself satisfaction in what you have. If you really don’t like it, allow yourself permission to make changes.”

“Despite what you may believe, you can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can make mistakes and still be capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love. Everyone has disappointed someone they care about. Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes. Not because we’re inadequate or fundamentally inept, but because we’re imperfect and fundamentally human. Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for failure.”

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness." -- Hermann Hesse

"Insults about the way I look can't be the thing that harms me and my heart the most. It has to harm me the least. If I have a daughter, I'm going to tell her that. Far too many women are much more hurt by being called fat or ugly than they are by being called not smart, or not a leader. If someone told me that I was stupid or that I wasn't a leader, or that I wasn't witty or quick or perceptive, I'd be devastated. If someone told me that I had a gross body, I'd say, 'well, it's bringing me a lot of happiness.' Like, I'm having a fine time of it. Having my priorities aligned like that has helped me have a happier life."

"Suadade. Last night I learned about this perfect Portuguese word by my most profound and articulate friend...there is not an English word that aptly translates shaded, but it so perfectly captures the emotion I have to often felt and have been feeling constantly on this trip...[it was explained as] the lovely ache of knowing that beauty fades, but is here, in your hands, right now. The dream of casting the moment in iron and holding it close forever...when the moment you are experiencing, feeling and sensing is so magical to you that you already ache for when it's over."

"There is enough that doesn't go right in life, so anyone can work themselves into a puddle of pessimism and a mess of melancholy, but I know people who, even when things don't work out, focus on the wonders and miracles of life. These folks are the happiest people I know. You see, everything else in the gospel- all the should and the musts and the thou shalt- lead to love. When we love God, we want to serve Him. We want to be like Him. When we love our neighbors, we stop thinking so much about our own problems and help other to solve theirs."

"That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air...Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer."

"these fragments i have shored against my ruins."

"for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am now."

-1 Corinthians 13:12

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever by ugly…if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

--Roald Dahl

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

--Hemingway

"A kind of light spread out from her. and everything changed color. And the world opened out. and a day was good to awaken to. and there were no limits to anything. and the people of the world were good and handsome. and i was not afraid anymore."

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

To love. to be loved. to never forget your own insignificance. to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. to seek joy in the saddest places. to pursue beauty to its lair to never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch To try and understand. to never look away. and never, never to forget."

--Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

"Tell me what's the difference between hope and waiting because my heart doesn't know it constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting

it constantly gets lost in the fog of hope."

--Anna Kamienska

"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you can say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, half colours, too many."

--Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

"If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

--Junot Diaz

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

--Isak Dinesen(psuedonym of Baroness Karen Blixen, Out of Africa)

"I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely- sometimes I feel a need for that silence- where there's nothing but the grey sea- with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmer of the waves."

--Vincent van Gogh, from letter to his brother Theo, 17 Sept. 1882

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”